How We Got So Close to a Graham Greene China Book…But Not Quite – Part 2

The major reason we never got a Greene China book was that he never spent any time in China – and so it never became part of “Greeneland”. What a potentially great book we never got – imagine a Greene book on China that was as insightful as The Quiet American was regarding Indo-China or The Comedians on Haiti or The Power and the Glory on Latin America. But Greene never went to China despite having absorbed books on China (see previous post) as a boy and written a short play on China that he later binned (see previous post).

However, he very nearly did go to China in a major way. In Greene’s autobiography of his early life, A Sort of Life, the author recalls that at 21 he briefly took up a post with British American Tobacco who promised him a post in China. However, it never materialised and, demoralised at not getting to go to China, Greene left BAT and went to work at the Nottingham Journal, thereby beginning a life as a journalist and writer. What great ad copy BAT might have had in China though!